One morning Julian Assange will awaken to see an unmanned drone hovering outside his bedroom window. It will fire a small but deadly missile through his window, ending his miserable little life. And I will smile...

The nice thing about governments when it comes to history buffs is that everyone is covering their ass all the time. They cover their ass by documenting what they were told to do when and by whom... otherwise they might someday be accountable for their own actions, or be accused of doing things on their own.

I do not have high confidence in the desire of government to be open, because government is made up of people and people do not like to be subject to scrutiny. That said, there is so much cover-your-ass (CYA) going on in government that there will always be a paper trail.

My Parents have a TV and hooked up to that TV is a computer. They use that computer to stream in movies. Not from Netflix or anything. Just those websites. I knew it would happen sooner or later, they got a nasty virus, I had to go and clean it up. Since I had the drive mounted to another computer in the back room while doing the scan, they had the news on. Of course a little blurb about Wikileaks comes on.

My mom says something along the lines of "oooh, you shouldn't visit that site!" To my father. What spurred this comment I couldn't quite tell. So I poke myself out of the back room, the scan was started and it would be a while before it was finished anyways. So I pondered. Then I queried "Why would you say that?". She paused, and looked at me. I couldn't quite tell if she had answer ready, so in order to give her time and keep us from an awkward silence I say "Well, I am actually quite informed of the whole situation, but I don't watch the news with any regularity, so I'm just curious what the public opinion is on the situation. Don't worry I'm not going to lecture you or anything."

To which she slowly spilled, "Well, I don't know anything about the site really. But I know that whenever a site makes it in the news like that, its a target for virus writers to try and put their code on the site and infect a lot of users."

Which is kind of something I told her earlier, about how people will try and inject malicious code onto an actually innocent website, but I could tell my laymen explanation of it wasn't quite technical enough for her to actually grasp how it works.

I wanted to respond to her silly logic, because she still visits Facebook, CNN.com, Yahoo, MSN - whatever, and there's no more assurance those sites will be safer than Wikileaks, but I just let my mom believe whatever it is she wants to believe.

It could have been full well that she doesn't like what Wikileaks is doing, or Julian Assange, or something else, but didn't want to get into a debate with me.

In any event, my anecdotal evidence is that the negative light the media shows on wikileaks is working on the average joes of North America.

Perhaps this is a solid reminder that we are becoming too reliant on 'domain names' and not doing enough to track and keep actual IP addresses. Perhaps it's time for a review of some of our habits, bookmarking, browsing history and, address finding

Sounds like what we need is a browser plugin that logs the IP of a website when bookmarked, or perhaps even in history, along with the name.

In future requests, it could only lookup DNS to check for changes, and prompt for action (update or not)

If the domain ever disappears, it could use the IP from the log to reach the site, and the original domain name to send as a Host: header (For virtual hosts where just using the IP alone won't get you to the right website)

1) Take a domain->IP translation.2) Hash it3) Put it in a distributed hash table similar to what most newer Bittorrent clients do with torrents4) Congrats! You now have a distributed DNS system with little to no central control.

and brave in dictating how we think other people's money should be spent.

Welcome to the me generation, where the freedom and justice are just buzzwords to drive angst on message boards, but wait Jennifer Anniston has a new boyfriend? I can't believe they allowed that Palin girl to get to the finals, and did you see who the new judges on Idol are going to be?

The romans had bread and circuses, the conservatives/tories have home owner ship, holland has to mortage deduction and America has the two cars in the drive way.

What does this do? It is about creating a working "middle" class. A hard working "middle" class. But not a real middle class. Not a middle class that has power but a middle class that have just enough to give them something to loose if they try to gain anything. The principle is VERY simple. Feed the masses just enough to don't make it an issue of starve or riot but rather, eat enough or riot and starve.

Strike, and you loose your mortage, can't make the monthly car payments and therefor you got to swallow everything, just so you can keep the two cars you so desperately need for the job to pay for the cars because there is no public transport alternative.

It is VERY effective. Look at the recent election results, people voted to protect the rights of rich people. Unemployed people voted against unemployment protection. All in the believe that they are some kind of middle class that doesn't need any government protection from the super rich. The divide between rich and poor has never been so big and the poor are voting to increase the gap.

Forget about letting them eat cake. Let them dream of cake, and they will go as sheep to the slaughterhouse.

There is a reason the rich are rich. They are smarter then the poor people.

. Unemployed people voted against unemployment protection. All in the believe that they are some kind of middle class that doesn't need any government protection from the super rich. The divide between rich and poor has never been so big and the poor are voting to increase the gap.

You can't blame them. Propaganda says that if they work hard, get an education (and more debt with that) and invest their money smart (does anyone actually think the super rich invest in those shit mutual funds you invest it or even those "small caps" that your newsletter points out every month?!?); they too can be rich.

Or the biggest one - anyone can be rich! Just start a business and a way you go!

As someone who's started a couple of businesses, I really wish that were true. It's really hard with all the

There is a reason the rich are rich. They are smarter then the poor people.

I wasn't aware that being born to rich parents means you are intelligent. There can only be so many opportunities to exploit during one's lifetime. Sure, there are always brilliant and/or lucky people (usually both) who ride the innovation wave, but most of the "elite" could trace it's money at least a generation back.

There is a reason the rich are rich. They are smarter then the poor people.

I wasn't aware that being born to rich parents means you are intelligent. There can only be so many opportunities to exploit during one's lifetime.

Rich kids are (on average) probably more intelligent than poor kids because of their environment. Rich usually means better food and health care, better education, parents that stimulate their children more, parents that have a better network that can help their carreers, and less stress factors as crime in the neighbourhood or in the family etc.

Sure, because sitting in a university/college and learning "how to work for someone" is really "education" these days.

sheesh. I'll never understand people's fixation with "being told they're doing good in life". there was a time that a university degree represented a "learned person, who specialized in the field of [whatever]". these days, it's just a ticket that some people insist others have, to prove that:
1) the person is willing to sit and do as their told for at least a few years at a time,
2) t

Are you sure about this? I'm sure there was a much bigger difference between a king or duke in the Middle Ages who could order anyone's head chopped off at will, who could seize anyone's land, and who could basically do what he wanted, to people today.

Nowadays the "ultra rich" may be able to afford many homes and travel often. But unless they fly out of non commercial terminals, they still have to stand in the TSA line line everyone else. They can't kil

No, all they have is "bigger" toys, but the POWER that comes with riches is gone - reserved by governments only.

Unless you count their ability to "campaign finance" the legislation they want that benefits them and their business interests.

So yeah, there might be more zeroes at the end of the net worth of rich people than there were before, but considering that "poor" people and "middle class" people usually have shelter, television, transport (private or public), food, etc, it's actually the poor who are better off than ever before.

And more and more people have to work two or three jobs to keep those things, because the rich people are paying workers less and charging more for goods and services in order to keep adding those extra zeroes.

Nowadays the "ultra rich" may be able to afford many homes and travel often. But unless they fly out of non commercial terminals, they still have to stand in the TSA line line everyone else. They can't kill anyone or have anyone killed. They can't drive drunk. No, all they have is "bigger" toys, but the POWER that comes with riches is gone - reserved by governments only.

They can't kill anyone or have anyone killed. They can't drive drunk. No, all they have is "bigger" toys, but the POWER that comes with riches is gone - reserved by governments only.

You sure about that? They can buy off the cops and judges. And hell, even if they do get caught, they can afford the best lawyers in the country. Even if they don't get away with it entirely, they're going to get a _far_ lighter sentence than anyone else who committed the exact same crime. My father got a DUI and was given a far harsher sentence than a _17 year old_ rich kid I knew who had one. What was that kid's punishment? His highschool said they were going to withhold his diploma for a while. They neve

Dude, you're arguing with the Slashdot Ideological Brigade. There is no hope. There is no reason. It's a pack of teens and young "adults" who have somehow already managed to ossify their brains with the political equivalents of crystal meth and heroin. These are the people who think they live in an actual police state and the NSA is building $100 billion dollar decryption farms to find out what women's underwear they secretly buy on amazon.

For fucks sake, can we give the social polemical shit a rest for just one article?

The heart of the internet just skipped a beat. This is important in a technical and political sense. Is it too much to ask for some comments giving technical insight into the DNS system, historical precedents, or exisiting context? Instead we get a +5 copy paste rant about the death of the middle class that could be placed in just about any other thread or a ZeroHedge comment section for that matter.

Ah, I love the smell of blind, rampaging individualism in the morning!

You may have heard about the "poverty trap". Poverty is a condition that's really hard to reverse, most people will never do it and will pass it along to their children.

With social support, many of the poor can improve their way of living. They can study, they can have their kids in school, they can have better health and education, which makes them better workers, benefiting the whole economy in the end. Yes, I mean you and me.

Of course, just throwing money at them will fix nothing, of course. That's what a populist politician would do. But social programs are not about throwing money at the poor.

Without social support, all the poor can do is fight against each other for day-to-day survival. I think it's pretty clear this doesn't bring up the best in people. Just correlate the crime rates with social protection in rich countries, and it's pretty clear.

A very small percentage, the smarter of the poor, will probably make it into the middle class. A minority will resort to crime, hurting society (yes, you and me). The vast majority will live a life of scarcity and resignation. It's not so bad if at least you can survive and have your basic needs covered. When this is not the case, it sucks big time.

Even worse, instead of the social ascension you talk about like it's so easy, I've been watching more and more middle-class raised people fall into poverty. Many with higher education have shitty jobs where they make the minimum wage or little more. And there's no way they can improve their situation because more and more companies have employees fighting between each other like dogs. Guess who wins, the competent and honest or the greedy and deceitful? Once again, the whole society loses.

The more money goes to the few richer, the more they want. The less they will want to contribute to the lower layers, and money brings power, so it gives them even more ways to shit the balance to their side. This eventually hurts the vast majority of the people. If you can't see this, you have your brain washed.

Bread and circuses. It's been this way for thousands of years - you're just realizing it?

For a while we had a chance to build a different world. But human nature (I'm too lazy to do it myself so I will "trust" my politician/god/celebrity to do it for me) won out in the end. So either continue to be a sheep, or be a wolf.

EveryDNS already said [pcworld.com] that their DNS servers were getting DDoSed, and so they found it a better move to drop one customer and their baggage for the sake of their other thousands of customers.

And, ultimately, no more Internet? Or what are the power elites gonna do to hide their shenanigans from the people?

If this is what the so-called free and so-called democratic world is, I'd say we must be progressing nicely towards a total worldwide fascist corporate police state and/or a distributed and decentralized revolution to eliminate all hierarchies.

Wikileaks' successful movement from the country which it has transgressed* to one of the many countries that are willing to give it safe harbour is a sign of "a total worldwide fascist corporate police state"? It strikes me as a reminder that whistleblowing will survive so long as nations exist and are sometimes unwilling to play by eachother's rules. Heterogeneity for the win.

*I don't mean this pejoratively, it's just a graceful verb in this instance.

>Wikileaks' successful movement from the country which it has transgressed* to one of the many countries that are willing to give it safe harbour is a sign of "a total worldwide fascist corporate police state"?

It's a sign of us not being there yet, but the DNS takedown is a step in that direction.

Google News is already censoring certain websites (like infowars) that it doesn't like - upto last week Infowars was part of the daily G-News summary but not anymore. And on their youtube site Google is yanking videos "because criticizing the president violates community standards" or "video of US soldiers killing journalists/children is not acceptable". It's censorship. There's no other words for it.:-|

How much does it cost to set-up my own Web Hosting Engine? I'd gladly host wikileaks regardl

Uh, really? You've never hosted a website, even if just for tests?It costs the price of a decent internet connection (upload bandwidth is the most important) that doesn't block port 80 (some ISPs do, others don't) and a PC connected 24/7.

Infowars isn't being censored that I can see, either. It's very difficult to get into Google News, and top-tier providers bounce in and out all the time.

As for censorship, Youtube isn't stopping anyone from talking about the issues, only from showing graphic violence. Private site, their policies. It's not hard to start your own site and do it yourself - but it is slightly hard than just whining about it.

People spouting off about the lack of freedoms (and lack of democracy?!?!?!) demonstrated by the wikileaks relocations need to go back to 8th, maybe 9th grade Civics-- and relearn that Bill of Rights protections do NOT apply to private entities, and that EveryDNS / Amazon have every right to drop anyone who costs them more money than its worth (unless they signed a contract forbidding that).

In fact, if youll go back and look at the Amendments again, youll note that theyre "Congress shall not"s, and that

So at what line do we consider something as 'free speech' no matter if it is in print, or on the internet?

If a newspaper gets classified information through regular investigative journalism, they are now NOT allowed to print that information? (see: Pentagon Papers) [wikipedia.org]

If Joe Lieberman was in power in 1971, would we even know the extent of the corruption of the Johnson and Nixon administrations? Or would all their lies and wrongdoing just be 'swept under the rug' and out of sight, out of mind? Would the New York Times and the Washington Post be threatened and censored from publishing their information?

Some quotes to contemplate:
Censorship reflects a society's lack of confidence in itself. - Potter Stewart
The first condition of progress is the removal of censorship. - George Bernard Shaw
The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. - John Gilmour
As to the evil which results from a censorship, it is impossible to measure it, for it is impossible to tell where it ends. - Jeremy Bentham

Democracy ONLY works when the public is well informed and this means the public must know things you would rather keep secret. How can I vote for the guy who is going to make foreign policy if I don't know the foreign policy?

Yes, this makes life very hard for democratic leaders. Though shit. It comes with the political system. I am sure cops would be able to do their jobs far better if we restrict the freedom of citizens as well. For instance a curfew would make patrolling the streets just so much easier.

But we can't do that so we accept that criminals go free because they got rights.

Wikileaks just made life harder for US politicians. So? What do you value more? Freedom or an easy life for the diplomatic core?

And the silly thing is that the outrage isn't really present in the countries the US has the most troubled relations with. Iran doesn't even give a shit.

But all this HAS given the US public a real insight into the true goings on on the diplomatic front. Just what is the official line? Well now we know. So we can base our votes on that... or one who promises the largest tax cut. Whatever takes the shortest attention span.

It would be a good idea for us to write to our "direct reports" - our congress-critters, Obama, and perhaps Biden - in direct support of Wikileaks. I plan to. I'm also struck that the government intelligence agencies keeps increasing their surveillance along with the statement, "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear."

I would suggest that the same applies to governments and other large organizations, and Wikileaks.

It's kind of similar to a kid saying, "I'm sorry," when what he really means

Joe Lieberman's basic mindset appears to be that the public should know only what the US government wants us to know. He's hardly alone in this - people who want to control access to information want to control thought. However, this gives him and people like him about as much credibility as the Iraqi Information Minister.

And of course, it's an anathema to democracy, but that never stopped Joe before. I should also mention that given who his financial backers are, you might as well call him the senator for Israel, not the senator for Connecticut (To be clear, I treat corporate-sponsored senators much the same way, for instance "Bob Dole (R-ADM)").

PC World wonders: "In an idyllic future where we make heavy use of the cloud, what happens if a cloud service provider removes content it deems inappropriate, or just doesn't like?"

Welcome to the mid-1990s. At least that's when I started worry about that, after my ISP deleted my web site because of content that offended the owner's moral sensibilities. That's when I sat down, figured out how to install Linux and Apache on an old computer, and began self-hosting.

Eric Besson, the French ministry for digital economy, has declared that France cannot accept to host a website which violates the secret of diplomatic relations and endanger people who should be protected by said secret.

If the US has a hidden goal of making China look pretty moderate and nice in comparison to the west, its working like a charm. It would be doubleplus ironic if China would lighten their censoring at the same time as the west applies what now looks like total censorship on all leaked material.

I was uncertain before but now im 100% certain, China will take over as the next super power and it will happen a lot faster than i could ever expect. I couldnt imagine just how willing the west is to commit seppuku and dismantle the democracy in favour for totalitarian fascism. Moussilini would be proud.

Can you be sure to be the first to hear yesterdays news, today. People were submitting this all last night and evening, and after every other site reported it finally Slashdot get's t's act together and posts the story. I don't understand why people pay for this site -- probably the same people who pay for Hotmail.

And so now that Open Government has well and truly arrived our leaders are busy trying to shut it down. Well the public have had no privacy for a long time. Now politicians and bureaucrats are getting a taste of their own medicine.

The moral is don't say or do anything unless you wouldn't mind the entire world knowing. That means you too, Hillary!

What I don't get is as of this posting their whois data is still showing:

Name Server:NS1.EVERYDNS.NET
Name Server:NS2.EVERYDNS.NET
Name Server:NS3.EVERYDNS.NET
Name Server:NS4.EVERYDNS.NET

Why don't they just update their friggin dns records and call it a day. You can run your own dns server or choose from the billion providers that are out there - heck for that matter pick a half dozen or so on different services around the world and have fun seeing who is last to dump you.

There have been reports that a government inquiry prompted us not to serve WikiLeaks any longer. That is inaccurate.

Hmmmm. OK. Fair enough.

It’s clear that WikiLeaks doesn’t own or otherwise control all the rights to this classified content. Further, it is not credible that the extraordinary volume of 250,000 classified documents that WikiLeaks is publishing could have been carefully redacted in such a way as to ensure that they weren’t putting innocent people in jeopardy. Human rights organizations have in fact written to WikiLeaks asking them to exercise caution and not release the names or identities of human rights defenders who might be persecuted by their governments.

Right..... That sounds like a pretty political statement to me. Firstly, Amazon cannot say whether or not WikiLeaks controlled or had 'rights' to the content on there nor is it Amazon's place to judge whether it was putting anyone in jeopardy. Given that's almost the exact wording of the government 'enquiry' then the first statement seems grossly inaccurate. None of what Amazon says has been established legally.

This issue goes to the heart of the controversy over who controls the internet; specifically who controls ICANN and the DNS root servers.

Right now, DNS control resides with the United States, and up to this point they have defended this status quo by assurring the world that the US is a bastion of absolute free speech and therefore best placed to control this most centralised, hierarchical and critical piece of internet architecture.

And now, when faced with the first real and signifigant test of its will, the United States' resolve crumples almost immediately. Gone is any guarantee--implied or otherwise--that the DNS servers will be beyond political or domestic influences(In truth, the takeing down of "terrorist" sites has been ongoing for some years). The weak appeal that these are the actions of a private company is a thin rag which fails to cover the US governments nakedness. This censorship is on the express will of the government.

This was the first real test; the US failed it. This has the potential to split DNS completely; with US trust now bankrupt, no other country will give it credit. In 5 years time, when you go looking for wikileaks.org or indeed slashdot.org, don't expect to get the same IP address as everyone else.

Julian Assange:
Since 2007 we have been deliberately placing some of our servers in jurisdictions that we suspected suffered a free speech deficit inorder to separate rhetoric from reality. Amazon was one of these cases.

As I stated on my recent tweet:
"Do we really need DNS afterwards? Give me an IP and I'll give them a shortened URL through Social Nets"
- http://twitter.com/#!/brunoborges/statuses/10682824059256832 [twitter.com]
I don't think DNS is needed anymore, at least for websites. With the advent of URL shorteners, we all can publish websites online, without DNS, and through Social Networks show it to the world, easily through some link like http://bit.ly/myFooWebsite [bit.ly].
DNS is, IMO, the last hope for Internet control.
I have no idea how E-Mail or other protocols could deal with an Internet without DNS, but surely there's a way. Maybe, not invented yet.

You're just replacing DNS for a similar system. If they can bring down/seize wikileaks.org, why couldn't they bring down http://bit.ly/wikileaks [bit.ly], or whatever?

And relying on social networks for uncensored information spreading is the worst idea ever, unless you're talking about distributed social networks, which basically don't exist yet. Do you think Facebook or Twitter won't censor if the US govt asks "nicely"?

There are some very important uses for DNS that a url shortner doesn't exactly handle, like round robin load balancing for example. All URL shortening does it leave your site's availability up to a service that you don't even pay that could pull the plug on you even easier (I'll guarantee they don't want to handle the ddos either).

If only browsers bookmarked the IP address as well as the domain name.

It would be an interesting feature to have, but generally speaking if you've been to the site, odds are pretty good you still have the A record in your local DNS cache. I find it easier to look this up on Windows than Linux. For Windows, you just run "ipconfig/displaydns", for Linux you need to have caching nameserver running, and then either dig or nslookup the site in question against your local caching nameserver.

At what point will wikileaks go after who they were originally intended - despots in Africa and the Middle East, and maybe some dirty corporations? Just about everything that I've seen released this time is a bunch of "well, duh" stuff and driven by base anti-Americanism. I'm not saying some secrets don't need to be exposed, just that Assange seems so callous in doing it.

Uh, if the greatest trove of confidential information in history about one of the most holier-than-thou countries in the world (and I say this as an American) fell into your lap, you'd be a complete moron not to publish it.

Your economy is in the shitter because you've spent trillions chasing ghosts in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Maybe if you spent the money on, gee, INFRASTRUCTURE, like rail and roads, and thereby plowing money back into your own country, you might have something to show for the last ten years, instead of thousands of dead soldiers.